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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Systems Client Experience Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )

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Well, it's Tuesday again, but this time, today we had our third big storage launch of 2009! A lot got announced today as part of IBM's big "Dynamic Infrastructure" marketing campaign. I will just focus on the
disk-related announcements today:

IBM System Storage DS8700

IBM adds a new model to its DS8000 series with the
[IBM System Storage DS8700]. Earlier this month, fellow blogger and arch-nemesis Barry Burke from EMC posted [R.I.P DS8300] on this mistaken assumption that the new DS8700 meant that DS8300 was going away, or that anyone who bought a DS8300 recently would be out of luck. Obviously, I could not respond until today's announcement, as the last thing I want to do is lose my job disclosing confidential information. BarryB is wrong on both counts:

IBM will continue to sell the DS8100 and DS8300, in addition to the new DS8700.

Clients can upgrade their existing DS8100 or DS8300 systems to DS8700.

BarryB's latest post [What's In a Name - DS8700] is fair game, given all the fun and ridicule everyone had at his expense over EMC's "V-Max" name.

So the DS8700 is new hardware with only 4 percent new software. On the hardware side, it uses faster POWER6 processors instead of POWER5+, has faster PCI-e buses instead of the RIO-G loops, and faster four-port device adapters (DAs) for added bandwidth between cache and drives. The DS8700 can be ordered as a single-frame dual 2-way that supports up to 128 drives and 128GB of cache, or as a dual 4-way, consisting of one primary frame, and up to four expansion frames, with up to 384GB of cache and 1024 drives.

Not mentioned explicitly in the announcements were the things the DS8700 does not support:

ESCON attachment - Now that FICON is well-established for the mainframe market, there is no need to support the slower, bulkier ESCON options. This greatly reduced testing effort. The 2-way DS8700 can support up to 16 four-port FICON/FCP host adapters, and the 4-way can support up to 32 host adapters, for a maximum of 128 ports. The FICON/FCP host adapter ports can auto-negotiate between 4Gbps, 2Gbps and 1Gbps as needed.

LPAR mode - When IBM and HDS introduced LPAR mode back in 2004, it sounded like a great idea the engineers came up with. Most other major vendors followed our lead to offer similar "partitioning". However, it turned out to be what we call in the storage biz a "selling apple" not a "buying apple". In other words, something the salesman can offer as a differentiating feature, but that few clients actually use. It turned out that supporting both LPAR and non-LPAR modes merely doubled the testing effort, so IBM got rid of it for the DS8700.

Update: I have been reminded that both IBM and HDS delivered LPAR mode within a month of each other back in 2004, so it was wrong for me to imply that HDS followed IBM's lead when obviously development happened in both companies for the most part concurrently prior to that. EMC was late to the "partition" party, but who's keeping track?

Initial performance tests show up to 50 percent improvement for random workloads, and up to 150 percent improvement for sequential workloads, and up to 60 percent improvement in background data movement for FlashCopy functions. The results varied slightly between Fixed Block (FB) LUNs and Count-Key-Data (CKD) volumes, and I hope to see some SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmark numbers published soon.

The DS8700 is compatible for Metro Mirror, Global Mirror, and Metro/Global Mirror with the rest of the DS8000 series, as well as the ESS model 750, ESS model 800 and DS6000 series.

New 600GB FC and FDE drives

IBM now offers [600GB drives] for the DS4700 and DS5020 disk systems, as well as the EXP520 and EXP810 expansion drawers. In each case, we are able to pack up to 16 drives into a 3U enclosure.

Personally, I think the DS5020 should have been given a DS4xxx designation, as it resembles the DS4700
more than the other models of the DS5000 series. Back in 2006-2007, I was the marketing strategist for IBM System Storage product line, and part of my job involved all of the meetings to name or rename products. Mostly I gave reasons why products should NOT be renamed, and why it was important to name the products correctly at the beginning.

IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller hardware and software

Fellow IBM master inventory Barry Whyte has been covering the latest on the [SVC 2145-CF8 hardware]. IBM put out a press release last week on this, and today is the formal announcement with prices and details. Barry's latest post
[SVC CF8 hardware and SSD in depth] covers just part of the entire
announcement.

The other part of the announcement was the [SVC 5.1 software] which can be loaded
on earlier SVC models 8F2, 8F4, and 8G4 to gain better performance and functionality.

To avoid confusion on what is hardware machine type/model (2145-CF8 or 2145-8A4) and what is software program (5639-VC5 or 5639-VW2), IBM has introduced two new [Solution Offering Identifiers]:

5465-028 Standard SAN Volume Controller

5465-029 Entry Edition SAN Volume Controller

The latter is designed for smaller deployments, supports only a single SVC node-pair managing up to
150 disk drives, available in Raven Black or Flamingo Pink.

EXN3000 and EXP5060 Expansion Drawers

IBM offers the [EXN3000 for the IBM N series]. These expansion drawers can pack 24 drives in a 4U enclosure. The drives can either be all-SAS, or all-SATA, supporting 300GB, 450GB, 500GB and 1TB size capacity drives.

The [EXP5060 for the IBM DS5000 series] is a high-density expansion drawer that can pack up to 60 drives into a 4U enclosure. A DS5100 or DS5300
can handle up to eight of these expansion drawers, for a total of 480 drives.

Pre-installed with Tivoli Storage Productivity Center Basic Edition. Basic Edition can be upgraded with license keys to support Data, Disk and Standard Edition to extend support and functionality to report and manage XIV, N series, and non-IBM disk systems.

Pre-installed with Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager (TKLM). This can be used to manage the Full Disk Encryption (FDE) encryption-capable disk drives in the DS8000 and DS5000, as well as LTO and TS1100 series tape drives.

The new product has some excellent advantages. FlashCopy Manager offers application-aware backup of LUNs containing SAP, Oracle, DB2, SQL server and Microsoft Exchange data. It can support IBM DS8000, SVC and XIV point-in-time copy functions, as well as the Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) interfaces of the IBM DS5000, DS4000 and DS3000 series disk systems. It is priced by the amount of TB you copy, not on the speed or number of CPU processors inside the server.

Don't let the name fool you. IBM FlashCopy Manager does not require that you use Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) as your backup product. You can run IBM FlashCopy Manager on its own, and it will manage your FlashCopy target versions on disk, and these can be backed up to tape or another disk using any backup product. However, if you are lucky enough to also be using TSM, then there is optional integration that allows TSM to manage the target copies, move them to tape, inventory them in its DB2 database, and provide complete reporting.

Yup, that's a lot to announce in one day. And this was just the disk-related portion of the launch!

IBM kicks EMC in the teeth with the announcement of System Storage Easy Tier, a new feature available at no additional charge on the DS8700 with the R5.1 level microcode. Barry Whyte introduces the concept in his [post this morning]. I will use SLAM (sub-LUN automatic movement) to refer generically to IBM Easy Tier and EMC FAST v2. EMC has yet to deliver FAST v2, and given that they just recently got full-LUN FAST v1 working a few months ago, it might be next year before you see EMC sub-LUN FAST v2.

Here are the key features of Easy Tier on the DS8700:

Sub-LUN Automatic Movement

IBM made it really easy to implement this on the DS8700. Today, you have "extent pools" that can be either SSD-only or HDD-only. With this new announcement, we introduce "mixed" SSD+HDD extent pools. The hottest extents are moved to SSD, and cooler extents are moved down to HDD. The support applies to both Fixed block architecture (FBA) LUNs as well as Count-Key-Data (CKD) volumes. In other words, an individual LUN or CKD volume can have some of its 1GB extents on SSD and other extents on FC or SATA disk.

Entire-LUN Manual Relocation

Entire-LUN Manual Relocation (ELMR, pronounced "Elmer"?) is similar to what EMC offers now with FAST v1. With this feature, you can now relocate an entire LUN non-disruptively from any extent pool to any other extent pool. You can relocate LUNs from an SSD-only or HDD-only pool over to a new Easy Tier-managed "mixed" pool, or take a LUN out of Easy Tier management by moving it to an SSD-only or HDD-only pool. Of course, this support also applies to both Fixed block architecture (FBA) LUNs as well as Count-Key-Data (CKD) volumes.

This feature also can be used to relocate LUNs and CKD volumes from FC to SATA pools, from RAID-10 to RAID-5 pools, and so on.

Pool Mergers

What if you already have SSD-only and HDD-only pools and want to use Easy Tier? You can now merge pools to create a "mixed" pool.

SSD Mini-Packs

Before this announcement, you had to buy 16 solid-state drives at a time, called Mega-packs. Now, you can choose to buy just 8 SSD at a time, called Mini-packs. It turns out that just moving as little as 10 percent of your data from Fibre Channel disk over to Solid-State with Easy Tier can result in up to 300 to 400 percent performance improvement. IBM plans to publish formal SPC-1 benchmark results using Easy Tier-managed mixed extent pool in a few weeks.

Storage Tier Advisor Tool (STAT)

Don't have SSD yet, or not sure how awesome Easy Tier will be for your data center? The IBM Storage Tier Advisor Tool will analyze your extents and estimate how much benefit you will derive if you implement Easy Tier with various amounts of SSD. Those clients with R5.1 microcode on their DS8700 can download from the [DS8700 FTP site].

IBM is the leader in high-end disk attached to mainframes, with the IBM DS8700 being our latest model in a long series of successful products in this space. Here are some key features:

Full Disk Encryption (FDE), which I mentioned in my post [Different Meanings of the word "Protect"]. FDE are special 15K RPM Fibre Channel drives that include their own encryption chip, so that IBM DS8700 can encrypt the data at rest without impacting performance of reads or writes. The encryption keys are managed by IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager (TKLM).

Easy Tier, which I covered in my post [DS8700 Easy Tier Sub Lun Automatic Migration] which offers what EMC promised but has yet to deliver, the ability to have CKD volumes and FBA LUNs to straddle the fence between Solid State Drives (SSD) and spinning disk. For example, a 54GB CKD volume could have 4GB on SSD and the remaining 50GB on spinning drives. The hottest extents are moved automatically to SSD, and the coldest moved down to spinning disk. To learn more about Easy Tier, watch my [7-minute video] on IBM [Virtual Briefing Center].

z/OS Distributed Data Backup (zDDB), announced this week, provides the ability for a program running on z/OS to backup data written by distributed operating systems like Windows or UNIX stored in FBA format. In the past, to backup FBA LUNs involved a program like IBM Tivoli Storage Manager client to read the data natively, send it over Ethernet LAN to a TSM Server, which could run on the mainframe and use mainframe resources. This feature eliminates the Ethernet traffic by allowing a z/OS program to read the FBA blocks through standard FICON channels, which can then be written to z/OS disk or tape resources. Here is the [Announcement Letter] for more details.

One program that takes advantage of this new zDDB feature already is Innovation's [FDRSOS], which I pronounce "fudder sauce". If you are an existing FDRSOS customer, now is a good time to get rid of any EMC or HDS disk and replace with the new IBM DS8700 system.

IBM System Storage TS7680 ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway for System z

When it comes to virtual tape libraries that attach to mainframes, the two main players are IBM TS7700 series and Oracle StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM). However, mainframe clients with StorageTek equipment are growing frustrated over Oracle's lack of commitment for mainframe-attachable storage. To make matters worse, Oracle recently missed a key delivery date for their latest enterprise tape drive.

What's new this week is that IBM now supports native IP-based asynchronous replication of virtual tapes at distance, from one TS7680 to another TS7680. This replaces the method of replication using the back end disk features. The problem with using disk replication is that all the virtual tapes will be copied over. Instead, the ProtecTIER administrator can decide which subset of virtual tapes should be replicated to the remote site, and that can reduce both storage requirements as well as bandwidth costs. See the [Announcement Letter] for more details.

My colleagues, Harley Puckett (left) and Jack Arnold (right) were highlighted in today's Arizona Daily Star, our local newspaper, as part of an article on IBM's success and leadership in the IT storage industry. At 1400 employees here in Tucson, IBM is Southern Arizona's 36th largest employer.

On Wikibon, David Floyer has an article titled [SAS Drives Tier 1 to New Levels of Green] that focuses on the energy efficiency benefits of newer Serial-Attach SCSI (SAS) drives over older Fibre Channel (FC) drives. This makes sense, as R&D budgets have been spent on making newer technologies more "green".

Of course, people might consider this an [apples-to-oranges] comparison. Not only are we changing from FC to SAS technology, we are also changing from 3.5-inch drives to small form factor (SFF) 2.5-inch drives. It seems odd to specify 2000 drives, when only two of the five scale up to that level. Few systems in production, from any vendor, have more than 1000 drives, so it would have seemed that would have been a fairer comparison.

However, Hu's conclusion that the combination of SAS and SFF provides better performance and energy efficiency for both IBM DS8800 and HDS VSP than FC-based alternatives from any vendor seems reasonably supported by the data.

Meanwhile, fellow blogger David Merrill (HDS) pokes fun at IBM DS8800 in Figure 2 in his post [Winner o’ the green]. This second comparison was for 4PB of raw capacity, which 4 of the 5 can handle easily using 2TB SATA drives, but the DS8800 is based on SAS technology and does not support 2TB SATA drives. A performance-oriented configuration with four distinct DS8800 boxes employing 600GB SAS drives is used instead, causing the data for the DS8800 to stick out like a sore thumb, or perhaps more intentionally as a middle finger.

The main take-away here is that IBM offers both the DS8700 for capacity-optimized workloads, and the DS8800 for performance-optimized workloads. Some competitors may have been spreading FUD that the DS8700 was withdrawn last month, it wasn't. As you can see from the data presented, there are times where a DS8700 might be more preferable than a DS8800, depending on the type of workloads you plan to deploy. IBM offers both, and will continue to support existing DS8700 and DS8800 units in the field for many years to come.

Now that the US Recession has been declared over, companies are looking to invest in IT again. To help you plan your upcoming investments, here are some upcoming events in April.

SNW Spring 2010, April 12-15

IBM is a Platinum Plus sponsor at this [Storage Networking World event], to be held April 12-15 at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, Florida. If you are planning to go, here's what you can go look for:

IBM booth at the Solution Center featuring the DS8700 and XIV disk systems, SONAS and the Smart Business Storage Cloud (SBSC), and various Tivoli storage software

IBM kiosk at the Platinum Galleria focusing on storage solutions for SAP and Microsoft environments

I have personally worked with Mark, Neville, Vincent and Gordon, so I am sure they will do a great job in their presentations. Sadly, I won't be there myself, but fellow blogger [Rich Swain from IBM] will be at the event to blog about all the actviities there.

The webinar will include client testimonials from various companies as well.

Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit, April 27-29

I will be there, at this this 2-and-a-half-day [Executive Summit] in Scottsdale, Arizona, to talk to company executives. Discover how IBM can help you manage your ever-increasing amount of information with an end-to-end, innovative approach to building a dynamic infrastructure. You will learn all of our innovative solutions and find out how you can effectively transform your enterprise for a smarter planet.

Continuing my discussion of this week's announcements of IBM storage products, I will cover the announcements that double storage capacity per footprint.

Linear Tape Open - Generation 5

IBM announced [LTO-5 drives], the TS2250 half-height and the TS2350 full-height drives, as well as support for LTO-5 drives in its various tape libraries: TS3100, TS3200, and TS3500. The native 1.5TB capacity of the LTO-5 cartridge is nearly double the 800GB capacity of the LTO-4 predecessor. With 2:1 compression, that's 3TB of data per cartridge! Performance-wise, the data transfer rate is 140 MB/sec, about 17 percent improvement over the 120MB/sec of the LTO-4 technology. The TS2250, TS2350, TS3100 and TS3200 now all offer dual-SAS ports for higher availability.

LTO-5 carries forward many of the advancements of past generations. For example, LTO-5 continues the G-2/G-1 "backward compatibility" architecture, which means that the LTO-5 drive can read LTO-3 and LTO-4 cartridges, and can write LTO-4 cartridges. Like the LTO-3 and LTO-4, the same LTO-5 drive can read and write WORM or regular rewriteable cartridges. Like the LTO-4, the LTO-5 offers drive-level data-at-rest encryption. These use a symmetric 256-bit AES key, managed by IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager (TKLM).

One thing that is new in LTO-5 is the Long Term File System [LTFS] available on the TS2250 and TS2350, which allows you to treat the tape as a hierarchical file system, with files and folders, that you can drag and drop like any other file system.

XIV storage system

IBM [doubles the capacity of the XIV storage system] by supporting 2TB SATA drives. A full 15-module frame can hold up to 161TB of usable capacity. The smallest 6-module system with 2TB can hold up to 55TB of usable capacity. At this time, all of the drives in an XIV must be the same type, so we do not yet allow intermix of 1TB and 2TB in the same frame. The 2TB are more energy efficient, with a full 15-module frame consuming on average 6.7 kVA, compared to 7.8 kVA for the 1TB drives. The performance is roughly the same, so if, for example, your application workload got 3700 IOPS per module with 1TB drives, it will get about the same 3700 IOPS per module with 2TB drives.

The EXN1000 and EXN3000 can now double in capacity with 2TB SATA drives. These can be attached to the N3000 entry-level models, such as the N3400.

DS3000 disk system

The DS3200, DS3300 and DS3400, as well as their related expansion drawers, now supports 2TB SATA drives. This means that a single control unit with three expansion drawers can hold up to 96TB of raw capacity (48 drives).

DS8700 disk system

The DS8700 also now supports 2TB SATA drives, for a maximum raw capacity over 2PB, as well as new 600GB Fibre Channel drives. Now that IBM offers [Easy Tier] functionality, pairing Solid State Drives with slower, energy-efficient SATA disk makes a lot of financial sense.

That's a lot of announcements! As always, feel free to dig into each of the links to learn more about each product.

The client that bought these dozen IBM System Storage DS8800 disk systems also bought three DS8700 systems.

Governor's Celebration of Innovation [GCOI] is an annual awards gala, with attendees who include technologists, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers. Last week, IBM was awarded "Innovator of the Year" in the Large Company category for its Easy Tier feature of the IBM DS8700 that allows optimal use of Solid-State Drives through sub-LUN automatic movement of data. IBM's Long Term File System (LTFS) was also a finalist under consideration.

I almost sprayed coffee all over my screen when I read this post from fellow blogger from EMC Mark Twomey on his StorageZilla blog titled [Dead End]. In it he implies that you should only consider storage technologies based on x86 technologies such as those from Intel, not other CPU technologies like POWER or MIPS.

Puh-leeze!

When IBM first came out with the SAN Volume Controller in 2003, we were able to show that adding Intel-based SVC nodes can improve the performance and functionality of POWER-based DMX boxes from EMC. EMC salesmen often retorted with "Yes, but do you really want to risk your mission-critical data going through an Intel-based processor solution?" This FUD implied that Intel had a bad reputation for quality and reliability. The original Symmetrix were based on Motorolla 68000's but they modernized to use IBM's POWER chips in their later models. EMC's previous attempt to use Intel technology was their EMC Invista, a commercial failure. It is no surprise then that EMC DMX customers are scared to death to move their mission critical data over to Intel-based V-max.

I have found the primary reason people fear Intel-based solutions is their experience with poorly-written Windows programs. There were enough of these poorly-written Windows programs that everyone has either personal experience, or knows someone who has, and that was enough.

It reminds me of the time I was in Vac, Hungary, giving a lab tour to a set of prospective clients where we manufacture the DS8000 series and SAN Volume Controller. Rows and rows of beautiful Hungarian women sliding disk drives in place, and big hefty Hungarian beefcake moving the finished units to their appropriate places. The head of the facility explained all about the hardware technology, how we check and double check all of the equipment individually, and together as a system. One client stated "Yes, but how often are problems from the hardware? We find nearly all of our problems on disk systems from whichever storage vendor we buy from are in the microcode." It's true.

Both Intel-based processors and POWER-based processors have all the technological functions needed to run storage systems. The difference is all in the microcode. So, if you are looking for safe and stable microcode, the IBM System Storage DS8700 continues its POWER-based tradition for compatibility with previous models. For those that demand x86-based units, the IBM SAN Volume Controller has been around since 2003, the XIV Storage System has been in production since 2005, and our IBM N series are also Intel-based, running Version 7 of the ONTAP operating system.

This week, IBM made over a dozen announcements related to IBM storage products. Here is part 2 of my overview:

IBM System Storage® DS8000 series microcode

One of the advantages of acquiring XIV as IBM's other high-end disk system, is that it allows the DS8000 team to focus on the IBM i and z/OS operating systems. As a result, IBM DS8000 has over half the mainframe-attach market share.

For System z customers, the latest DS8000 microcode has synergy with z/OS and GDPS, now supporting 4x larger EAV volumes, faster high-performance FICON (zHPF), and Workload Manager (WLM) integration with the I/O Priority Manager. IBM has a world record SAP performance of 59 million account postings per hour. DB2 v10 for z/OS queries were measured at 11x faster using the new zHPF feature.

IBM System Storage® DS8800 systems

On the hardware side, the DS8800 now supports a fourth frame to hold a total over 1,500 disk drives. Yes, we have customers that three frames wasn't enough, and they wanted more.

IBM is now also offering new drive options. Small Form Factor (2.5 inch) drives now include 300GB 15K RPM drives, and a 900GB 10K RPM drives. But wait! There's more! The DS8800 is no longer a SFF-only box, it now allows for mixing in Large form factor (3.5 inch) drives, starting with the 3TB NL-SAS 7200 RPM drive.

IBM XIV® Storage System Gen3

We announced the XIV Gen3 already, but we have two enhancements.

First, we now offer a model based entirely on 3TB NL-SAS drives. If you are thinking, what IBM is going to put 3TB drives into everything? Yup. Once we go through all the pain and suffering of qualifying a drive, we make sure we get our money's worth!

Secondly, we have now an iPad application to manage the XIV. This has nothing to do with Apple CEO Steve Jobs passing away last week, it was merely coincidence.

IBM Real-time Compression Appliances™ STN6500 and STN6800 V3.8

The latest software for RtCA now supports Microsoft SMB v2, and enhanced reporting so that storage admins know exactly the benefits of the compression ratios of different file extensions.